ABOARD THE CARNIVAL SUNSHINE — More than a dozen feet above Deck 12, I’m inching my way across a thick blue line, and gripping a support wire as my cruise ship zips through the ocean.

The view up here may be spectacular, but the footing is tricky on this floating ropes course, one of the first at sea. With the sun shining and the wind whipping through my hair, it’s a fun way to pass the time, a novel experience between the buffet lunch and happy hour at the tequila bar.

But for Carnival, the uncertain footing could be a metaphor about the past year, and even for this vessel, which the company hopes will provide a model for updating its fleet. The Carnival Sunshine is the line’s newest old ship. It first sailed in 1996 as the Carnival Destiny, at the time the world’s largest cruise liner, an honor long ago surpassed. Instead of scrapping it, the company invested an unprecedented $155 million and 10 weeks in dry dock to undertake a complete makeover, adding two decks and increasing the capacity from 2,642 to 3,006 passengers.

New additions include a three-deck adults-only pool area; a huge water park with 40 interactive features; and a theater-dance club with a Jumbotron-style screen. The ship also features a poolside Guy Fieri burger counter, a burrito bar and several specialty eateries, from a family-style Italian restaurant to a pan-Asian kitchen.

The Sunshine, which debuted in Europe in the spring, sails from New Orleans to the Caribbean through April, giving Texans an easy chance to experience some of the latest ideas in cruising. Next spring the ship moves to Port Canaveral, Fla. And because Carnival has been forced to cut prices, the trips come at a remarkably low price, with seven-day sailings beginning at $439 per person based on double occupancy, or less than $63 per day.

That’s if passengers can get past the headlines. It was the Carnival Triumph, after all, that lost power in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, stranding passengers on a ship where the elevators wouldn’t work and the toilets overflowed. And it was the Carnival Corp.-owned Costa Concordia that sank last year in the Mediterranean due to what Italian courts called criminal negligence. This summer, Carnival’s CEO, who had been on the job since 1979, was relieved of his title.

“It has been kind of a rough year for us,” says company president Gerry Cahill, fully aware of the understatement.

Some travelers admit they initially had misgivings.

“A bunch of my friends at work were joking about it. They said, ‘Oh, it’s Carnival, you’ll be late coming back because it’s going to break down,’” says Philip Miller, 33, from Oceanside, N.Y., who was cruising with his girlfriend and her family. But those concerns were long forgotten as the ship sailed off the coast of Italy on a sunny July day.

Things are looking up. Carnival has rolled out plans for industry-leading safety measures. And passengers seem to love the ship changes. “It’s been great. It’s almost brand spanking new,” says Patricia Kemper, a Toronto accountant cruising with her husband and two kids. “And I love the price point.”

Halfway through the cruise, Miller and a friend were racing each other on the twisting dual-tube waterslide. In the evening, he planned to return to Alchemy, a custom-cocktail lounge that is one of seven new ship bars. “They have my favorite drink, absinthe.”

Some of the biggest changes reveal themselves in the evening. Passengers can stroll from a piano bar to karaoke to a pub featuring unplugged acoustic musicians. There’s also a George Lopez-branded comedy club and a Cuban-themed bar aft. The library, usually an overlooked corner of the ship, now offers a spot to have a drink too.

The goal is to keep passengers circulating on the ship, staying out later, and incidentally, spending more money.

Carnival has also made its spaces more flexible, replacing the large showroom theater found on most ships with a smaller venue with chairs that can be removed; after the nightly production show, the space becomes the Liquid Lounge dance club.

A few of these changes have already appeared on new Carnival ships, and you can expect similar additions on other lines in this notoriously competitive copycat industry.

The transformation took work. The ship was literally taken apart at a shipyard in Italy and reassembled with two additional decks and refigured public spaces. The tone has changed, too. Gone are the splashy, trippy decorations that announced to passengers they were on a Carnival ship. The vessel is now understated, at least by the standards of a company that still calls its vessels Fun Ships.

“After 15 years, we needed to redecorate,” Cahill says, walking through the atrium as a guitar player strums a Mumford & Sons song a few decks below. “What was popular in 1995 is not necessarily popular today.”

Larry Bleiberg, a former Dallas Morning News Travel editor, is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala.

PLAY: A three-deck adult area includes pool, cabanas, hot tubs and waterfall; a sports area has a ropes course, basketball hoops, pool and foosball tables, giant chessboard and miniature golf; and a water park offers splashy surprises like a 150-gallon dump bucket.

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